What
does SharePoint IT Pro version 2 look like? How will you transform
your skills to retain employment in the new world of cloud, hybrid and
damned confusing IT? What indeed even is this new world we are facing?
Are we more fragmented as individuals, what place is there for
developers, and what planning roles can an IT Pro evolve themselves into
to ensure a career in SharePoint?

Demand
has never been higher for SharePoint staff, and yet many IT Pro's and
Devs are simply unemployable in this new world. Come and learn what
skills you need to thrive in this rapidly evolving world that we face
and consider how to evolve yourself from the IT Pro of old to the
in-demand leading edge Hybrid professionals sought by the SharePoint IT
and consulting industry.

While
you are here, learn what kind of salary these new roles we can place
ourselves into might actually pay. Plan your next IT Pro career
opportunity by joining me on a holistic overview of what it takes to be
the IT Pro V2, understanding how the world is rapidly changing, what the
new market is seeking, what roles are in demand, how to avoid recruiter
snake oil, avoiding unicorns and even gathering some tips on finding
the right staff for your SharePoint projects. If you want a career in
SharePoint VNext as IT Pro VNext, this is a must attend session!

Session 2: Surprise!

We've not quite confirmed session two but fear not, we have an amazing backup session just incase with Jon talking about DevOps

Welcome back to a new year and an all new NEBytes event! Hopeful you will forgive our slight interruption to your normally scheduled NEBytes entertainment programming but I promise the wait will have been worth it!

We are very pleased to have along a great speaker from Xamarin themselves with not just a single talk but a double bill all about your favourite cross-platform mobile development platform...

The most recent addition to the Developer Evangelism team at Xamarin, Mike previously worked within the support department. Before joining Xamarin he worked within the entertainment control industry developing control systems for installations such as the London Eye. His passion grew for mobile when he was tasked with developing mobile apps for site engineers tocontrol the lighting on these installations. Currently Mike is responsible for engaging with the community in Europe and takes great pleasure in having the opportunity to meet customers face to face and present new technologies to them. Mike lives in the UK and enjoys music production, running and his Xbox One.

Building cross-platform native UIs with one shared codebase was once just a dream. With Xamarin.Forms, this dream is now a reality. Xamarin.Forms allows you to build a native UI for three platforms with one shared C# codebase. Simply put, if you know C# then you already know how to build iOS, Android, and Windows Phone apps. Leverage the .NET Framework to build out your shared business logic including integration with web services and Azure Mobile Services and then build out your shared UI in C# or XAML. Xamarin.Forms also features a built-in two-way data binding, dependency service to help you implement platform-specific code, an advanced cross-platform animation system, support for custom controls, and lots of other powerful features to help you build the best apps possible in the least amount of time.

During this session we will cover the Xamarin platform and the brand new Xamarin.Forms library to share even more code across iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. Moreover, we will really focus on the code with several live coding adventures throughout the entire session. When you leave you will have the knowledge to create your first iOS, Android, and Windows Phone mobile apps in C# with Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms.

Session2: Automated UI Testing for iOS and Android Mobile Apps

An ever growing number of mobile devices with constantly advancing operating system releases are hitting the market at a lightning pace. Creating a comprehensive testing suite is imperative to success in the mobile market to ensure your app is of the highest quality with each and every release. Unit tests can only test your core business logic. How can you ensure your user interface is bulletproof and regression free on four versions of iOS on 20 devices or eight versions of android on over 18,000 device models! This is where creating automated user interface testing for mobile apps comes in.

Xamarin.UITest is a freely available testing framework that enables you to create user interface tests to programmatically interact with native and hybrid apps. Swipe, tap, or rotate any user interface element and then perform real world assertions and take screenshots for visual validation along the way. Learn how to create these tests and run them locally on your own device or simulator or take them to the Xamarin Test Cloud to automatically test your application on thousands of physical devices ensuring mobile success.

Now with your apps out in the wild how do you plan on monitoring your applications in real time for crash reporting and analytics? Xamarin Insights provides a fully cross-platform API for all of your mobile applications and even integrates into popular services such as GitHub and Visual Studio online for mission critical updates. Learn how to easily integrate Insights into your mobile applications and extend further with identity and service integration.

Come along and join us for a rare festive NEBytes this December we are delighted to welcome DevExpress Analytics Program Manager, Seth Juarez to the region!

Date: Tuesday 9th December 2014

Time: 18:30-21:00

Come along and join us for a rare festive NEBytes this December we are delighted to welcome DevExpress Analytics Program Manager, Seth Juarez to the region!

Practical Machine Learning - Predicting Things

Machine Learning can often be a daunting subject to tackle much less utilize in a meaningful manner. In this session, attendees will learn how to take their existing data, shape it, and create models that automatically can make principled business decisions directly in their applications. The discussion will include explanations of the data acquisition and shaping process. Additionally, attendees will learn the basics of machine learning - primarily the supervised learning problem.

About Seth Juarez

Seth Juarez holds a Master’s Degree in Computer Science where his field of research was Artificial Intelligence, specifically in the realm of Machine Learning. Seth is the Analytics Program Manager for DevExpress where he specializes in products dealing with data analysis, shaping, and presentation. When he is not working in that area, Seth devotes his time to an open source Machine Learning Library, specifically for .NET, intended to simplify the use of popular machine learning models, as well as complex statistics and linear algebra.

We're pleased to announce that for NEBytes this October we are delighted to welcome SUGUK North East's SharePoint Server MVP John Timney and Microsoft Integration MVP Michael Stephenson.

Date: Wednesday 15th October 2014

Time: 18:30-21:00

Goal Alignment in the Hybrid SharePoint Estate - John Timney

In any organization, employees represent the most valuable organisational asset, so ensuring SharePoint meets the collaborative challenges and productivity needs in using the platform will ultimately affect an organization’s profitability and overall success of a SharePoint program. As we move more towards Hybrid estates, or are considering Cloud based deployments for SharePoint, Office 365, SaaS or PaaS, aligning the people and the objectives becomes financially intertwined.

This session will focus on how to improve that critical aspect of SharePoint project incepetion and a key facet of Enterprise frameworks such as TOGAF; Goal Alignment. A lack of Goal Alignment in the inception phase is where many SharePoint projects fail before they start. It can be a very misunderstood Governance area outside of the familiar IT domain, and can pull kicking and screaming the mystical SharePoint Architect into the uncomfortable world of business. It is where we set the measures to prove we have delivered something of value, and one of the earliest facet of governance where the business and IT world collide head on. It is the tool for aligning IT and business goals.

Join honourary MVP for the day "Dilbert" and his work colleagues as they assist in explaining what Goal Alignment is, and the benefits it can bring, to stop your Hybrid SharePoint Projects failing before they even begin.

A veteran Microsoft “Most Valued Professional” award holder and a former MSDN “Regional Director” shows a respected and globally recognised technical background, supported by 25 years in Government and Telecoms IT. He holds current SC Clearance and is ITIL certified. John is co-author of several books and a regular speaker at conferences throughout the UK and Europe and a strong advocate for best practice.John is an enthusiastic, technically diverse, well informed and forward thinking Senior Enterpirse Architect with a very credible market reputation based on global enterprise scale skills hard earned from the ground up.John recently took on an assurance role to validate and assure the 300,000 seat global migration, approach, solutions design, platform and architecture of a Hybrid Office 365 Online Enterprise Wide SharePoint 2013, Lync and Exchange implementation for a Top 4 Global IT Consultancy.He has spent a number of years in a leadership team as Enterprise Assurance and Strategy Lead Architect at the UK Department of Education’s flagship E-Cloud programme, specialising in Delivery Assurance and Strategy around the implementation of an enterprise scale IL3 compliant Private Cloud (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) SharePoint 2010 delivery.His roles typically involve advising Project Directors and Managers, Client Directors and Technology Leaders, End Users, Technical Architects, Developers and Designers to deliver roadmaps for technology evolution and transformation.John is a large scale Enterprise Architecture and Delivery Specialist with proven experience in architectural assurance, strategy, delivery and management of end to end Enterprise scale environments. Skills focus around people, process, environments and systems in the Microsoft Practice area related to all aspects of assurance and governance for Collaboration Programs of work.

There are a number of ways to connect your on premise resources with services in the cloud. What are these options and how do you choose the right ones for your organisation to invest in? In this session Michael will discuss some of the options available if you wish to connect your on premise data centre with services in the Microsoft Azure Cloud. This session will share some architecture experience from real world projects which used some of these various approaches.

Michael is a highly experienced freelance consultant with lots of experience of architecting and delivering integration projects which leverage the Microsoft technology stack. He has deep, practical knowledge of delivering complex solutions with BizTalk, Microsoft .NET, Microsoft Azure and associated technologies. Michael has also been a technical lead on 25+ projects which have leveraged Microsoft's cloud platform.

Michael is heavily involved in the community activities around Microsoft technologies through the Microsoft MVP and Advisor/Insider programmes and also speaks at user groups on a regular basis. Michael is also an author for Pluralsight having produced a very popular courses on .net and RabbitMQ.

This week we took the difficult decision to cancel our event. It's not something that we like to do, and we'd tried to give this one more of a chance by delaying it by three weeks to enable Microsoft to do some more promotion on it. We never want to cancel events, and we especially didn't want to in this case because we felt we were already messing about the few people who signed up for the first date.

In this case it seems that the topic just isn't popular, and a number of the other events around the country were also cancelled. While it would be nice to think that most people weren't interested because their Server 2003 migrations are already under control, industry research would suggest that isn't the case. A lot of the organisations who haven't yet made any effort to move on from Server 2003 either aren't prioritising resources to do it, or they feel like they're stuck with it because of some application, or they don't perceive it as broken, so they don't intend to fix it. We had hoped that we'd be able to assist in reducing some of those barriers.

We do feel bad about this, especially towards the pro-active guys who were going to come along to try to move their organisations forward, so in lieu of an event we're going to do this: In the coming days, we're going to take the content that we were putting together for the event and put it together into a collection of content here on nebytes.net. This should cover the main points that you would have taken away from the evening event, and may also help some extra people further afield. We hope that you all find it useful.

[UPDATE 2] Unfortunately it seem that this event is no longer viable, so we've had to take the difficult decision to cancel it. :-(

[UPDATE] Due to unforeseen circumstances, we are having to postpone this event until September 24th. The time is still the same, but we are now able to host the event in the normal NEBytes venue (Room 1.02, Claremont Tower, Newcastle University). Very sorry about that, but if you weren't able to attend before, hopefully this new date will be better for you...

This September, we're very happy to bring you a special event in conjunction with Microsoft.

MVP Windows Server 2003 End of Service Roadshow.

In early September 2014, MVPs and Community Leaders will be sharing their expertise to help you understand the technical and business impact of the end support for Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2 and Small Business Server 2003. A lot has changed since 2003 and so have the Microsoft product offerings, giving you greater functionality and flexibility. The evening will cover the following:

· What does End of Support mean?

Learn about what end of support means for your business and the implications of running unsupported technology.

· Why Windows Server 2012 and Azure?

Times have changed since 2003 and so have Microsoft’s product offerings. Learn about the increased functionality in Windows Server 2012 and Azure and how they can help your business needs.

· How do you move to Windows Server 2012?

Where to start can often be a daunting task when it comes to server migrations. This session will outline the methodology you should apply when thinking of migrating, and more importantly, how to migrate shown through hands on demos.

· Application compatibility

Application compatibility presents a potential barrier to upgrading. See first hand tools, hints and tips for upgrading your applications to Windows Server 2012 or to Azure.

Cross platform mobile development has never been easier. In this session Ross will show how to create a simple application for the three major mobile platforms with a single core project. He will cover the following in the hour long session:

An introduction to Xamarin (how it differs from other cross platform techniques)

Implementing the traditional "Hello World" using Xamarin

A quick overview of PCL vs Shared Assembly

Hello World using Xamarin Forms

A look at MVVM, and how to tackle some of the thornier cross platform mobile problems.

We're
pleased to announce that for NEBytes this July we will have a talk
specially prepared by Ross Dargan and Ben Lee covering a range of
interesting security items. Now most people wouldn't normally associate
the words "interesting" and "security" with each other but actually the
modern internet poses so some really fun problems that need to be solved
if you want to protect yourself.

Basic
internet security principals seem fairly straight forward until you
start pretending (hah!) that someone has access to all of your
communications. This is where crypto and security get interesting and
there are some really elegant solutions to these problems out there…

In
this session Ross and Ben will lay a quick foundation of the key
principals used before covering a range of topics and questions such
as...

How do you truly verify someone's identity without giving away too much information?

How can you agree a secure communication channel with someone in a public arena?

What happens next for internet communications?

The talk will be quite light hearted and demo ridden (that’s the plan anyway) so come along and join in - Tin foil hats optional

And we are pleased to have along for our second half Janine Weightman, Group Lead for Knowledge Management at Wellstream International Ltd who will present on: Harnessing SharePoint to drive a Knowledge Management strategy.

This session covers how to exploit the basic SharePoint functionality to create an enterprise collaboration and knowledge management platform designed for the business. We will discuss how we reshaped our organisational culture for better knowledge sharing and adoption of SharePoint. We will also cover some of the important lessons painfully gained from the implementation before finishing with a short Q&A.

We
are a bit late announcing our event this month as we've have had some
troubles getting things lined up ready for you. Unfortunately we've not
been able to sort a dev speaker or specific topic but fear not instead
of cancelling, our own Ben has some Lync content ready to go that he
delivered on the recent MUCUGUK tour "A Day of Lync 2013" and has
offered to step in.

It
has also been TechEd North America so Andy and Ben will also run a mini
re-cap session on the key bits of news... compressed into 30 minutes

Be
warned the Lync content from Ben will be very similar to NeBytes from
April 2013 so don't feel like you have to come along as you might have
seen it before! However if you are interested in Lync, are considering
deploying or know someone who is then Ben will be happy to answer any
questions and go off on tangents about design or deployment questions.

Join North East Bytes for our fourth event of 2014. In this event we'll be running a retrospective session covering all the news from BUILD 2014, so if you can't make it out to San Francisco why not come along and catch up on all the news with us.

Date: Wednesday 16th April 2014

Time: 18:30-21:00

If you're following the conference and see something you think might be of interest to the wider group, please feel free to either point it out to us so we can include it or why not event stand up and discuss it with members in our session - they don't bite! :), either way let us know via Twitter/Facebook/Website of anything that is of interest.